Tag Archives: Crony Capitalism

Throughout his campaign, Donald Trump promised to revolutionize trade policy for the benefit of American workers and industry. He should begin by stopping the Export-Import Bank from purveying corporate welfare.

Ex-Im is a federal agency established to help American exporters by providing taxpayer-backed financing to governments and businesses in developing foreign markets without access to the necessary means to buy American products. In its youth, Ex-Im did just that and bolstered exports in the interwar period to Cuba, Haiti and Burma. Over the last 50 years, though, it has ventured far from its original purpose and has become a vehicle for ruinous market distortion.

According to the Mercatus Center, some of the largest beneficiaries of Ex-Im financing are companies like Boeing, Bechtel Power, General Electric and Caterpillar — all multinational conglomerates that could conceivably get financing directly from private lenders.

Young Voices Associate Cathy Reisenwitz was published by The Blaze writing about crony capitalism and so-called “dark money.”

We all want to believe that regulators understand the industries they’re regulating well enough to improve their functioning. We all want to believe that regulations protect consumers from greedy businesses. Unfortunately none of that is true. And the sooner we stop worrying about what color the money is and start worrying about the actual, real-life effects of the regulation the money promotes the better off we’ll all be.